The Long Road Part One - The Writing
THE LONG ROAD TO SELF-PUBLICATION
“Five Ferries took 39 years to write & 16 months for everything else.”
Part 1 – The Writing
After nearly 40 years of effort, I published Five Ferries, my first novel. The writing took up most of this time, but in the last year and a half I entered the world of self-publication, and this is a story in itself.
At the end of 1978 I returned from six months working my way around Europe and set about writing a memoir. I began with a chapter deep in the story—about a ferry trip from Swansee to Cork and a tryst with an Irish woman. My stream of consciousness style shifted between the ferry and Ireland and the preceding days in Wales. Maybe the style was influenced by Ulysses, which I was reading at the time, but I was convinced this was how the story told itself. In nine months to follow, I outlined a 13-chapter novel, each in a distinct style I felt was appropriate to the action.
I started law school in August 1979 and the book—like the rest of my life—went on hold. But by the time I took the bar exam in the summer of 1982, I had outlined all the chapters and written rough drafts of most. I then moved from Washington, D.C. to New York City to look for work, taking only two suitcases and sleeping on a friend’s sofa. After I found a job and an apartment, a classmate offered to transport the rest of my belongings, including the cod box I used to keep my manuscript safe. After driving up from DC, he parked his car on the street in Greenwich Village on Halloween night 1982, taking inside my portable black & white television set but leaving the rest of my things in the car. During the night someone broke into the car and took everything, including the cod box and four years of effort on my book.
I was devastated. I patrolled the Village and the Lower East Side, looking in garbage piles and sketchy alleys for the cod box and the telltale typing paper boxes that held my draft chapters. I taped up signs asking for help. When I asked a local newspaper to print an article about my plight, a reporter asked what the book was about. I said mostly about a trip I took to Europe. He laughed and said: “So what, did you do it on one leg or something?” This didn’t help me find my manuscript but it was a lesson in marketing and the beginning of my disdain for the question: “So what is your book about?”
For several years I turned to short stories, because I could hope to finish and copy them and be sure I wouldn’t lose them. But by about 1987 I again felt the need to write a novel and decided I should rewrite rather than start from scratch. So, I replicated my outline from memory and began again to write the chapters.
In 1995 I bought a desktop computer and retyped everything into word processing software, which made editing much easier. I also discovered the Map Room at the New York Public Library and was able to check my geography. I felt this authenticity was one aspect of keeping the story true and thus worthwhile—at least as history.
By early 1996 I had finished drafts of all 13 chapters and printed and sent a few copies to friends. The responses were less than enthusiastic. Their suggestions all tended toward making the story less self-indulgent and more readable. I resisted most of these suggestions—figuring this was an artist’s prerogative—and continued trying to satisfy myself if possibly no one else. I also wrestled with the conflict between writing a memoir—true in all respects to my experience—and fictionalizing the story to make it more compelling.
Around 2008, I reached a crossroads and decided the story could remain true to the essential facts and lessons of life on the road while being set in an engaging fictional frame. I rewrote all the chapters in the same third person and past tense and tried to smooth out the stylistic differences. Still, the reactions from friends remained tepid.
In 2015, I spent two months writing and re-writing the opening few pages, looking for one narrative voice to carry through the book. Once I had the voice I began again from the beginning, trying to remain accurate in terms of time and finances and geography but creating romance and conflicts. This took me into 2017, when I decided it was time to seek professional help—editing that is.
See Part II - Editing
Writing Resources:
See Separate outline on wmrauthor.com: “Aspects of the Novel”